The Day After

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: September 24, 2002

NAJAF, Iraq—
As soon as American troops are rolling through Saddam Hussein's palaces, the odds are that this holy Shiite city 100 miles south of Baghdad will erupt in a fury of killing, torture, rape and chaos.

The Shiite Muslims who make up 60 percent of Iraq -- but who have never held power -- will rampage through the narrow streets here. Remembering the whispers from the bazaar about how Saddam's minions burned the beard off the face of a great Shiite leader named Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr, then raped and killed his sister in front of him, and finally executed him by driving nails through his head, the rebels will tear apart anyone associated with the ruling Baath Party.

In one Shiite city after another, expect battles between rebels and army units, periodic calls for an Iranian-style theocracy, and perhaps a drift toward civil war. For the last few days, I've been traveling in these Shiite cities -- Karbala, Najaf and Basra -- and the tension in the bazaars is thicker than the dust behind the donkey carts.

So before we rush into Iraq, we need to think through what we will do the morning after Saddam is toppled. Do we send in troops to try to seize the mortars and machine guns from the warring factions? Or do we run from civil war, and risk letting Iran cultivate its own puppet regime? In the north, do we suppress the Kurds if they take advantage of the chaos to seek independence? Do we fight off the Turkish Army if it intervenes in Kurdistan?

Unless we're prepared for the consequences of our invasion, we have no business invading at all.

So après Saddam, le déluge? That's only a guess, of course, but it's exactly what happened the last time Saddam was in trouble, at the end of the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

With the central government tottering, a Shiite uprising began in Basra and quickly spread. Here in Najaf, rebels tossed officials out of the windows of the Baath Party headquarters to be hacked apart by others below. Rioters raped and killed children in front of their parents.

Saddam's suppression two weeks later, as U.S. forces stood by passively, was equally brutal, with rebels hanged from lampposts and dragged to their deaths behind tanks. Not surprisingly, when I asked people in the bazaars about the uprising, they mostly turned pale and remembered urgent business elsewhere.

''It hurts my heart when I remember it,'' said Nasseem Jawad, a 40-year-old jeweler in the Najaf bazaar who was one of the few to admit to being in the area at the time. ''They burned the supermarkets, destroyed the laboratories, schools and hospitals.'' Mr. Jawad was prudent enough to adhere to the government line that the rebellion was the work of Iranian provocateurs and would not happen again, but I'd bet otherwise.

In Basra, I asked a senior Baath Party official if he wasn't worried that he and his family would be targets of mob wrath. He protested so passionately that I couldn't help thinking he had spent a few sleepless nights considering the possibility.

In the north of Iraq, the challenge for the U.S. will be different. Many Kurds will demand at least quasi-independence, and there will be a ferocious struggle for the city of Kirkuk, which floats on a sea of oil. Kirkuk is aggressively coveted by Kurds, by the Turkish-backed Turkmen minority and of course by the Iraqi Arabs who now control it.

More broadly, if the United States brings democracy to Iraq, it will mean seizing power from the 17 percent Sunni minority who dominate the army and government and giving it to the 60 percent Shiite majority. The upshot could be greater influence for Iran, a fellow Shiite country with close ties to Iraq's Shiite cities.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini spent 13 years in exile here in Najaf, and many top Iranian ayatollahs stayed for shorter periods. Iranian hard-liners are probably salivating at the thought of America naïvely creating a Shiite Iraq so that the two countries could pool their nuclear resources and build the bomb together.

Of course there are happier scenarios as well. Iraq also has a 95 percent literacy rate and a secular middle class that could eventually be fertile soil for a democracy that would be a model for the Arab world. So it's fine to hope for democracy, as long as we brace for civil war.

If we invade Iraq, it must be with eyes wide open. The most ticklish challenge ahead is not overthrowing Saddam but managing the resulting upheaval for a decade afterward.